


This Desolate Place

by braidedbootstraps



Series: Eyes Unclouded [1]
Category: Mononoke-hime | Princess Mononoke
Genre: Alpha/Omega, Angst, ETA, F/F, Femslash, First Time, Grief, Inspired by Princess Mononoke, Not Canon Compliant, OC, OC POV, OC backstory, Pre-Canon, Slavery, Trauma, Violence, amaya eren, consort cliche, f/f - Freeform, h/c, lady eboshi - Freeform, lady eboshi owns my entire heart and y'all gonna hear about it, trauma subtext
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:55:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23346535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/braidedbootstraps/pseuds/braidedbootstraps
Summary: Amaya Eren (OC) travels to Iron Town seeking the protection and employment of the notorious Lady Eboshi after her village is destroyed. She unexpectedly finds herself in love - and must make a choice that will shape her future forever.
Relationships: Eboshi (Mononoke-hime)/Original Character(s)
Series: Eyes Unclouded [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1679173
Kudos: 12





	This Desolate Place

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the first part of three and takes place before the canon narrative

_Now that I look back over what I've built and seen and heard by her side, I remember a time I'd almost forgotten. I'd chosen somewhere in our journey together to let the individual moments, each a golden grain of sand, cover my past. As a vast desert covers the ruins of a city, so forgotten was a small village._

I stood up for a moment from where I'd been bent at the waist, pulling spouts from the mud, to see my father waving to us. He was shouting something. A warm breeze vanished the shape of his words.

I stared for a moment, absently rocking Tomi. My little sister, who was nearly a year old but not yet walking, was often with me in the fields in a sling. It was a warm day, and she'd been sleeping soundly for the past hour, but had started to fuss. 

That was when I saw a man in armor, carrying a weapon I did not recognize, riding on horseback towards my father. Even from across the fields, it was clear he was not from our village. 

He held his weapon in one hand and his bridle in the other. It was like a spear, but a curved rather than a pointed blade fixed to its head. It flashed in the sun, and fear thrilled me suddenly; I dropped the basket of mud sprouts. The weapon swung down as I screamed.

There was a red ribbon of blood in the air. My father fell to the ground, beneath the rider's feet; his horse trampled his body.

Suddenly, there were at least twenty horseback samurai. Some drove their horses into the field, kicking up water and grass. I was running with Tomi held to my chest, bare feet splashing against the current and willing myself to learn to fly, or the God's to descend.

We were poor people, from a Northern farming post. We never asked for help from God's; that was not our place in the hierarchy of deities and humans. 

There were others around me, screaming for help, and shouts came from the village. Most of the villagers were out harvesting, like us. The cries were as likely from the rouge horsemen than from friends.

Tomi was crying from my holding her too tightly. I'd stopped screaming the moment I saw my father fall, but I was struggling to breathe as I reached the mud bank and started climbing.

I could smell new thatch being burned and saw a black cloud rising into the spring sky. 

Climbing the mudbank brought Tomi and me to the dirt road in between fields, and I dared look back for a moment.

In the minutes since I'd last looked upon it, hell had descended on our village. Our homes in flames, the public square they centered around thick with smoke and the shape of abandoned corpses. 

The air was thick with terror and the strange scent of too much blood. Unreal horror, which belonged in a poem of war, but not here. Not our home. 

And then, there was a hand on the back of my neck; I was being dragged into the air. I screamed aloud as I realized a rider had lifted me, and the knots that had tied Tomi's blanket to me fell apart.

Then, someone shouted my name before I slipped into the dark.

_My memories of that time are few. They come in and out of clarity; the more I focus on trying to see what happened to my family, the more it fades away._

The darkness that came with unconsciousness was unlike dreaming. I learned later that samurai had ridden along the dirt road and picked up young, frightened women as they went. I was one of them. 

A blow to the back of my head had knocked me into an unconsciousness unlike dreaming and unlike sleep. It was a nothingness that I will always be able to see when I close my eyes. The darkness precedes and follows all my sudden and desperate fears. 

When I woke, I felt sick almost as soon as I sat up. It was dark, and the ground swayed beneath where I sat.

I discovered quickly that the swaying ground was the floor of a wooden cart. I was seated between and across from other girls from my village, with bent heads. Our hands and ankles were chained together in iron.

It was growing dark, and behind us, a deep red sun hung over the road. The cart slowly bumped across the countryside I recognized, but far from home.

I shook the arm of the girl next to me. Her eyes were open, but she stared at the floor and would not move. 

"Have you seen my sister?" 

Raising my voice, I looked at the girls across from me. "I had a baby girl- in a sling cradle, have you seen a baby?"

"Quiet!" the side of the cart was struck.

The thick face of a man wearing a warrior's helmet looked over the side of the cart opposite. I saw his eyes and quickly looked at my feet. 

Time passed. I watched the bruises slowly flower on my arms and legs and tried not to think of where Tomi was now, or my mother, or my other siblings. 

The chains clinked slightly as one of us would move, but besides that, our captors and we were silent. Dusk fell until, at last, we heard crickets on the breeze. A cold night descended, and one massive, dark blanket was thrown over all of us.

In order not to think about where I was or where my family was, I thought of where I had been when I woke that morning. 

In our house, which was now likely little more than ash, I woke with the sun in my eyes. Two of the smaller children curled up next to me.

Suke woke me by shaking my shoulder; he needed me to cook breakfast. At fourteen, he'd started to stretch out a little, and his skin was darkest. Out of all my younger siblings, he's the oldest, and too old for pet names. But, like most of the village, I was struggling to get out of the habit.

The remains of last night's fire were still warm, so I got up and made some rice meal- then one of our neighbors came by with Tomi. 

Tomi did not always stay in the house with us for space, and lack of milk. She asked me at the door when I thought our mother would be back as I took Tomi from her. I told her I didn't know.

Mother had gone away to one of the cities four months ago for work and hadn't returned since. I was the oldest, and so was left in charge of my brother and three sisters. 

Father helped a little; now that Suke was older, he could spend the day with him, and the two older sisters, Yumia and Imari, were old enough to work on their own, and Tomi stayed with me. 

Some of the older women laughed to see me start wearing a child sling in the daytime. They said it was funny, being reminded I was a woman. 

I never thought much about being feminine unless it was pointed out to me. In our village, no woman was lovely. The work that we did there wouldn't allow it, under the aging sun in the fields all day, and the labor that built up our shoulders 'like men'. But that was the way of everybody. My masculinity in the eyes of others was a mystery to me.

The only ones who did not seem to feel it were my sisters. They rolled out of bed together and chattered while I put their breakfast in bowls. Occasionally they'd tug my hair gently or rub their cheek on my shoulder when I sat down. They ask for more breakfast, please, "big sister." 

I get dressed in blue cotton robes that were Mothers, that tie underneath the knees and at the elbows to keep the fabric out of the mud. A printed cotton sling for Tomi goes across my back and a thin belt around my middle to hold it.

I check on her, then take up my reed basket. Curled up against my back, she's already fallen asleep. 

I tell Yumia and Imari to stay together on the way to work; they're in a different field from mine, on the other side of the town. Being only seven, Yumia is apt to wander off if Imari doesn't mind her.

I watch them leave, then douse the fire. I am always the last to leave the house in the morning- father will have been up working for hours in the forests, getting more firewood. 

If I'd realized that was the last time I'd see them, I would have lingered in the doorway a little longer and watched them go. But I never stayed. I would never even have thought to.

I walked past some of the other women on my way to the sprout fields, and lingered over their gossip: _'I heard that rogue samurai raids are getting more frequent… Kwon? That's only twenty miles from here…won't the emperor do anything to stop it?'_

The cart came to a halt. Our chains rattled as we all swayed into one another beneath the tarp. The iron stung where it had begun to chafe the skin.

Soon there were sounds of a fire being laid and then lit. Our captors talked among themselves out of earshot. Tents were raised quickly, jokes exchanged. Occasionally the side of our cart would be kicked. 

We remained as silent as we dared. Eventually, two men stood close enough to overhear what they were saying.

_"What do you think of this lot?"_

_"Not much… What do you expect from farm girls? They're young enough; they ought to fetch a price in the brothels out East."_


End file.
